It's the Canadian conundrum. Most visitors want to see a grizzly bear and get a handle on the scenery. Unfortunately, this is a vast place -- the second largest country in the world -- the range of scenery is enormous, and there are at most only 66,000 grizzlies scattered across the whole of North America.
However, last year Rocky Mountaineer Railtours teamed up with Knight Inlet lodge at Glendale Cove to offer a package combining a close grizzly encounter with a train journey from Vancouver to Calgary through some of the country's most varied scenery.
Knight Inlet lodge is a floating wooden platform moored just off a pine-covered hillside, an exhilarating 40-minute seaplane ride from Vancouver Island. A three-night stay is made special by great staff, excellent food, comfortable accommodation, a full program of activities and an odds-on certainty of meeting the odd grizzly or three. Banff national park, in the neighboring province of Alberta, can claim no more than 70 grizzlies in its whole 3,218km2, but Glendale Cove is swarming with them, with 43 in just 11km2.
And there are black bears, cougars, seals, orcas and eagles to keep them company.
Minutes after checking in, Jill, our guide, was taking us on our first estuary tour, the skiff gliding slowly across the flat water.
Near the lodge, wooden posts rose up out of the water, the skeletal remains of a salmon cannery from the 1920s. When logging was big here, there used to be a school, a church and around 1,500 people.
Now the 11km2 around the lodge is protected and hunting forbidden, and there are plans to extend this to 64km2. Sadly, the bears roam a lot further. Numbers in British Columbia are officially put at 11,000 to 13,000, although biologists believe this is optimistic, while hunters continue to "harvest" their trophies.
We soon found Ursus arctos horribilis, the world's largest land carnivore after the polar bear. This one was a sub-adult grizzly wandering along the shoreline, flipping large gray rocks as though they were pebbles, to reach the molluscs beneath. Through my binoculars, I could see the expression in his eyes as he tried to suss us out. "We don't allow camera flashes, we look for signs of stress when we approach the bears and leave if they are stressed," said Jill. "This means we can spend longer near them."
Early-morning kayaking was a silent way of seeing bears in the sedge. When they emerge from hibernation in the spring, they feed on this vivid green grass at the mouth of the estuary where a river winds out of the forest. In the autumn, you can watch the bears catching salmon here. We paddled quietly up the river, two woodpeckers tapping away in the trees deep in the mist.
For the tracking tour, we rode in an old yellow schoolbus down a disused logging road on the opposite shore. Tim, the guide, found bear prints, scratch marks on trees and old salmon skeletons on a carpet of pine needles above the river. Stepping out of the bus felt like walking into Jurassic Park without the luxury of being able to shout, "Cut!"
The inlet tour in a motorboat took us north up the wide fjord, pine trees growing all the way down to the deep water, snow-capped peaks rising above green mountains. Around 250 Pacific white-sided dolphins appear here to hunt the herring. We were splashed by five of them bow-surfing, close enough to touch.
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